LookIt

Fast translations are not the same thing as good translations

After my last post, Patrik pointed me to a recent comparison of Swedish caviar-in-a-tube choices. The page, of course is in Swedish. Here is what it looks like in Chrome, my default browser:

The automatic offer to translate is great (and the very casual "Nope" option is a nice touch), so I tried it. About two seconds later, it's done!

Dangling sentences, bad grammar, and so on. As the page says, "Fixed so it's not."

Language tagging fail

My friend Patrik brought me some caviar-in-a-tube from Sweden this week. I have no idea what "drott-kaviar" is, so I searched for it on Google. Almost all the results were in Swedish (no surprise), and Google helpfully suggested "Search for English results only". I did so, but all the results were still in Swedish. So much for the bright future of the semantic web...

A good question asked on Slashdot for which I wish I could get answers from actual experts without having to wade through the trolls

Why are digital hearing aids so expensive? I had this same thought two years ago when my parents got theirs. The dearth of data useful to moderately technical people on what they are buying (my dad as a PhD in engineering from Harvard) was appalling, and I guess it still is.

First edition of "Our Bodies Our Selves"

While pawing through the antique section in the local used bookstore today, I found a treasure: a copy of the second printing of the first edition of Our Bodies Our Selves in very good condition at a very reasonable price. The first few editions were ground-breaking in many ways, and finding a first edition gives me a glimpse back to when the movement was taking flight a few years before I became aware of it. The work continues.

Some early Cisco hardware

I recently received the technical specs and schematics for the Cisco model 9A5. The Internet community might benefit from seeing the internals of this hardware, and I didn't see them online anywhere else. The hardware certainly seems more primitive than I would have expected from Cisco.

3D disappointment

We saw "Alice In Wonderland" in 3D yesterday, and the movie was quite fun but the 3D was not very good. The 3D experience was noticeably worse than when I saw Avatar in 3D a few months ago, even though I saw both in the same theater and I had a more central seat for Alice than I had for Avatar

Alice in 3D some unpleasant artifacts in some of the darker scenes, particularly falling down the rabbit hole and many interior shots. Any action where an object was supposed to be flying out of the screen or zooming by in the foreground came off as a muddy blur. Just to be sure that it wasn't my 3D glasses, I switched glasses a few times, and both pairs were identically bad in the same scenes. Also, the poor 3D was not universal in the movie: many scenes had depth exactly as one would hope. It seems likely that the Disney/Pixar 3D process is simply worse than that used for Avatar, or didn't do proper quality control on the 3D process throughout the movie .

Having said that, the movie itself was great. The acting was quite good, but the thing that stood out was a very appropriate balance of live action to high-quality animation. I will go to see the 2D version sometime in the next few weeks just to enjoy the movie, but I will probably not bother with any other Pixar 3D movies and hope that they fix their production process.

Update: This article explains why.